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Sierra Club Photography and the Exclusive Property of Vision

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Sierra Club Photography and the Exclusive Property of Vision How to cite: Kelsey, Robin. “Sierra Club Photography and the Exclusive Property of Vision.” In: “Eco-Images: Historical Views and Political Strategies,” edited by Gisela Parak, RCC Perspectives 2013, no. 1, 11–26. All issues of RCC Perspectives are available online. To view past issues, and to learn more about the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, please visit www.rachelcarsoncenter.de. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society Leopoldstrasse 11a, 80802 Munich, GERMANY ISSN 2190-8087 © Copyright is held by the contributing authors. Eco-Images 11 Robin Kelsey Sierra Club Photography and the Exclusive Property of Vision As executive director of the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1969, David Brower used photog- raphy to transform a California climbing and recreation group into one of the most in- fluential environmental organizations in the United States. Under his direction, the Club issued photographic books, cards, and calendars featuring charismatic images of nature in a state of pristine grandeur or untrammelled intimacy to expand its membership and promote its environmentalism. This historic use of a darkroom art for the sake of preserv- ing outdoor spaces established, through a curious series of trials, a new visual rhetoric for celebrating and defending nature as form. The Sierra Club Discovers the Power of Photography In the spring of 1951, the Sierra Club broadcast its national ambitions when it changed its statement of purpose from “explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast” to “explore, enjoy, and preserve the Sierra Nevada and other scenic re- sources of the United States.”1 Two years later, Brower began fulfilling these ambitions by launching a campaign against federal plans to build dams in Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. Brower believed deeply in the persuasive power of images and shaped the campaign around them. He had films made to represent a trip through the Monument and convinced Alfred Knopf to publish, and Wallace Stegner to edit, a photographically illus- trated book extolling the scenic wonders threatened by the dam.2 Brower distributed cop- ies of the book, This Is Dinosaur, to members of Congress and other influential persons.3 When the federal government dropped its dam-building plans in Dinosaur the following year, the political triumph and its confirmation of the power of image-driven lobbying permanently transformed the Club.4 1 Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 100. 2 Wallace Stegner, ed., This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). See Edgar Wayburn, “Sierra Club Statesman, Leader of the Parks and Wilderness Movement: Gai- ning Protection for Alaska, the Redwoods, and Golden Gate Parklands,” interview by Ann Lage and Susan R. Schrepfer, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, 1985, 194. 3 Richard L. Fradkin, Wallace Stegner and the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 189; Cohen, History of the Sierra Club, 168–71. 4 Richard Leonard later recounted, “Dave [Brower] changed the whole course of the Club’s political effectiveness in this campaign. It was at that time that the Sierra Club became a truly national organizati- on.” Richard Leonard, “Mountaineer, Lawyer, Environmentalist,” interview by Susan R. Schrepfer, vol. 1, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, 1975, 112. 12 RCC Perspectives Photographs take pride of place in This Is Dinosaur. It opens with 36 pages of them, mostly in black and white but a handful in color, taken by several photographers, includ- ing Philip Hyde, Martin Litton, and Harold Bradley. The title of the book operates as an introduction (i.e., Dear Reader, “This is Dinosaur”) but also as an index or caption (i.e., “This is Dinosaur”). The demonstrative pronoun of the title—This—points not to the Monument directly but rather to the book’s photographically driven representation of it. Or rather, the title assumes that pointing to that representation is equivalent to pointing to the Monument. In this respect, the title piggybacks on the photograph’s status as a representation beyond language, inherently laminated to what the photograph is of. As Roland Barthes once said with a touch of hyperbole, “the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is.’”5 This Is Dinosaur: the title promises a show- ing rather than a describing, a presentation rather than a representation. If you want to see what will be ruined if dams are built, the title insists, here it is. The Sierra Club’s use of photographs as a substitute for first-hand experience of places targeted for conservation assumed that the value of those places was primarily visual. The new mission statement had more or less explicitly affirmed this assumption in the phrase: “the Sierra Nevada and other scenic resources of the United States”(italics add- ed). Centuries ago, the words scenic and scenery had little to do with natural places. On the contrary, scenic derives from the French scénique, a word that in the fourteenth century meant “of or belonging to the stage or drama.” By the late seventeenth century, the English word scenery came to be associated more specifically with the decoration of a stage rather than with the drama as a whole. With the rise of the picturesque in the late eighteenth century, scenery and its cognates came to be applied to views in nature.6 To speak of “natural scenery” or “scenic resources” is to speak as if nature were a theater set, a motionless array of visual features awaiting human action and intended for a hu- man audience. Photography, which emerged out of the picturesque and bore a reputa- tion for faithful replication of the visual world in a still image, was a promising means by which to assess, communicate, and promote nature as scenery. 5 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 5. 6 The Sierra Club’s mission statement under Brower drew on a long history of associating land preservation with the preservation of scenery. In his foreword to These We Inherit: The Parklands of America, Brower quoted a passage from Frederick Law Olmstead written in 1865: “The first point to be kept in mind . is the preservation and maintenance as exactly as is possible of the natural scenery; the restriction, that is to say, within the narrowest limits consistent with the necessary accommodation of visitors, of all artificial constructions and the prevention of all constructions markedly inharmonious with the scenery or which would unnecessarily obscure, distort, or detract from the dignity of the scenery.” Ansel Adams, These We Inherit: The Parklands of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1962), 9. Eco-Images 13 The photographs in This Is Dinosaur represent the Monument as a recreation area. We encounter pictures of its headquarters, a display of local fossils, and many scenic views. Although some of the views contain no human figures, most include a small group of hikers, kayakers, or river rafters. Some views are distant, revealing a ma- jestic landscape that dwarfs the figures; others bring us close to the recreational fun they enjoy. As Stegner said in his foreword, the purpose of the volume was “to survey [Dinosaur’s] possibilities for human rest and recreation and inspiration, in the belief that the people and Congress of the United States should have a very clear idea of what they would be losing if they chose to sacrifice this National Monument to make a reservoir.”7 This Is Dinosaur was a way of educating people on the values that the Monument made available, but it was also a way of photographically supplying a spec- tacular virtual experience of these values. Brower understood the importance to the Club and to its mission of mingling the pleasure of looking at beautiful photographs with the imagined pleasure of being in a beautiful place. The conflation of these plea- sures would become a mainstay of the Club’s efforts at advocacy and self-promotion. This Is Dinosaur mainly construes recreation as a re-creation of the exploration of the American West. The notion that wilderness recreation was an invigorating way to reconnect to frontier experience was a core principle of the US environmental move- ment in general and of the Sierra Club’s program of conservation in particular.8 Most of the essays in This Is Dinosaur recount and celebrate the exploration of the Colorado River region by US government explorers such as William Henry Ashley and John Wesley Powell. Many of the photographs follow suit, offering us images of sublimity that echo those made by early survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson. The paddlers in the photographs may use neoprene rafts, but they still exemplify the exploratory spirit of earlier days. A pamphlet tucked in the back of This Is Dinosaur advocates resistance to the federal dam project in more explicit terms. In it, we find the Club supplementing certain photo- graphs with graphic notations to overcome the difficulty of using photography to convey hypothetical or counterfactual conditions. This begins with the pamphlet’s cover, which 7 Wallace Stegner, foreword to This Is Dinosaur, v. 8 On the role of frontier re-creation in wilderness preservation generally, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69–90; see also Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 29–62.
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